Development and evaluation of a sesame thresher as influenced by crop, machine and operational parameters

Abstract

The development of a sesame thresher for the purpose has clearly an edge over conventional methods of threshing and reduce the drudgery of work to a great extent. Due to the scarcity of daily labours, it is essential to bring in a sesame thresher, which is cost-effective, compact, reduce threshing losses and easy to use for sesame cultivars. The laboratory experiments were conducted with different levels of variables, from that the combination level of 11.0 ms^-1 peripheral velocity of threshing cylinder, 15 mm concave clearance, spike tooth type cylinder and 16.8 % (d.b) moisture content of harvested sesame capsule were selected. The selected combination level yielding the maximum threshing efficiency of 99.0 %, maximum cleaning efficiency of 99.4 % and minimum % visible damage to threshed sesame grains of 0.79 %, was optimized for the development of prototype sesame thresher. A prototype sesame thresher consisting of a mainframe, threshing unit, blower and sieve assembly, feed chute, power transmission system and transport wheels was developed with optimized level of variables. The prototype sesame thresher was evaluated for its performance in comparison with the conventional method of sesame threshing. Compared with the manual method of threshing, the prototype sesame thresher resulted in 17, 12, and 1.2 % savings in threshing efficiency, cleaning efficiency, and % visible damage to threshed sesame grains. The prototype sesame thresher results in 87 % and 83 % saving in time and cost respectively when compared to the conventional method of manual threshing.